UNICEF Offers $90,000 Seed Capital for Blockchain Startups

The UNICEF Innovation Fund has announced that it is looking to offer $50-$90,000 seed capital for blockchain startups. The Innovation Fund allows UNICEF to quickly assess, fund and grow open-source solutions that can improve children’s lives. Financial and technological support is available for companies that use technology in innovative ways to improve the world.

According to a statement on the organization’s website, UNICEF is looking to invest in a group of companies developing software solutions on open blockchains which should be scalable and globally applicable in the following categories:

Smart Contracts

One way the Innovation Fund is looking to explore the use of smart contracts is in the replication and improvement of existing organizational mechanisms. Additionally, these innovations should enhance efficiencies, transparencies, and accountabilities in contractual engagements such as in cases where multi-signatory contracts that guarantee certain actors are involved.

The solutions should also aim to enhance transparency in the distribution of resources as well as increase access and use of tokenized systems by creating more user friendly and more secure interfaces.

Analyzing data

Startups focused on this category should demonstrate solutions that use machine learning to understand the activities on public blockchains or explore whether it is possible to develop unicity from transactions on public blockchains.

The fund is also interested in startups looking to determine whether it is possible to use crypto-flows to help organizations and governments do and understand their transactions more efficiently and also if it’s possible to use blockchain data to solve humanitarian challenges such as human trafficking.

Tokens

Here, UNICEF is interested in startups working on how crypto tokens can work to incentivize or support behavior that benefits humanity and how various tokens could be connected to each other to maximize human potential.

Furthermore, is it possible to utilize digital scarcity, non-fungible tokens (non-fungible tokens are supposed to represent a real word asset that is unique and non-divisible unlike cash or other currencies), or digital collectibles for social good.

Mining

The fund is also interested in any solutions that can use passive distributed mining networks to create investment funding opportunities for the UNICEF Venture Fund.

Finally, it is important to note that funding opportunities will not be limited to the categories listed above only as the fund will be open to any ideas that are aligned with UINCEF’s general criteria.